Monday, 20 July 2009
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Chubby People Live Longer?
This post was also posted on Healthkicker.
Wow, that is great news. Being quite the “chubster” myself, I found this story interesting.
Health experts have long warned of the risk of obesity, but a new Japanese study warns that being very skinny is even more dangerous, and that slightly chubby people live longer.
People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.
"We found skinny people run the highest risk," said Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Medicine who worked on the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people.
"We had expected thin people would show the shortest life expectancy but didn't expect the difference to be this large," he told AFP by telephone.
The study was conducted by a health ministry team led by Tohoku University professor Ichiro Tsuji and covered 50,000 people between the ages of 40 and 79 over 12 years in the northern Japanese prefecture of Miyagi.
"There had been an argument that thin people's lives are short because many of them are sick or smoke. But the difference was almost unchanged even when we eliminated these factors," Kuriyama said.Main reasons for the shorter lifespans of skinny people were believed to include their heightened vulnerability to diseases such as pneumonia and the fragility of their blood vessels, he said.
My grandmother always believed this to be true especial with babies…in fact my Sicilian grandmother used to give us butter to fatten us up when we were babies.
But Kuriyama warned he was not recommending people eat as much as they want.
"It's better that thin people try to gain normal weight, but we doubt it's good for people of normal physique to put on more fat," he said.I won’t take this as a license to eat mass quantities but I won’t be fasting today either.
Are you surprised to hear these results? Will this affect your eating habits?
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- From: Gentemann@xanga
- Name: Gerald
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Comments (10)
Making the world a fatter and funnier place every day.
... WOW.
hahahah.
I'm not overly surprised at these results. Extraordinarily thin people tend to be missing more mandatory healthy components (in my experience, typically iron and protein) due to either nature (a higher functioning metabolism can keep a body from holding onto elements it needs) or choice (anyone with an eating disorder). While being bigger also carries its own disadvantages (excessive joint and muscle issues to include heart problems due to carrying around the excess weight), for the most part most of us are at least getting all the right things to make our bodies function properly.
This, of course, is a mass generalization as I know there are perfectly healthy thin people and horrifically unhealthy fluffy folk.
I'm kind of surprised, but not overly surprised.
This is why seriously, right in the middle of your "ideal weight" category is best. Don't pay too much attention to your BMI, rather you body fat pecentage. Any gym or fitness club will be able to measure this for you and make suggestions based on their readings. Not every height and weight suits everyone. I have a slightly overweight BMI for example (26), however, I'm only 12% body fat.
So take your BMI reading with a grain of salt, or not at all. Just because you tip the scale at a high number doesn't mean you're overweight. You can be 6' and 275 pounds, and depending on if you're a body builder or a couch potato, be anywhere between 2% and 40% body fat (maybe an exaggeration, but you get the idea).
Woah. . . never would have guessed that one. Awesome post!
holy shit this means i can eat a sarah lee everyday
I'll start fat kid training immediately!
Interesting O.O
uh huhh...